


they were watching (while we froze down below)

by rlbcaged



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, Banshee Stiles Stilinski, Crazy Derek Hale, Crazy Stiles Stilinski, Eichen | Echo House, He just is, Hellhound Derek Hale, Hopeful Ending, I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M, Medication, Not really though, Timeline What Timeline, also not really, creepy eichen orderlies, idk how he is a banshee, next tags are spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!!!, not dialoge heavy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:47:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21854743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rlbcaged/pseuds/rlbcaged
Summary: Derek gets lost in the routine of watching the man’s hollow cheeks, his paper-thin wrists, and the dark blue crescents hugging up to his eyes. The way one bony hand lifts his spoonful of oatmeal to his mouth without shaking in the slightest, while the other occasionally taps a rhythm into his sweatpants-clad thigh. One finger lifting and falling, then the other, repeating the cycle until they’ve all tapped. Then he does it over again. It took Derek a long time to realize the man was counting his fingers.Derek watches the man. The man watches him right back.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 85





	they were watching (while we froze down below)

**Author's Note:**

> the things in the spoiler part of the tags don't come up til the end really  
> see the end for a more detailed explanation (spoilers in end notes!!) bc this probably is confusing  
> the end is kinda rushed bc this story was starting to get away from me and i didn't want this to be too long  
> i think i covered everything but let me know if anything else needs to be tagged  
> no beta so all mistakes are mine  
> pls leave some love if you enjoy this
> 
> title is from the song Violet Hill by Coldplay
> 
> NOT MY CHARACTERS, all rights go to MTV, Teen Wolf, and Jeff Davis.

**_ “ _ ** **_ I'm _ ** **_ the one keeping you alive, okay, have you noticed that?” _ **

**_ Derek Hale was paralyzed from the neck down in eight feet of water. The only thing keeping him from drowning to death was Stiles.  _ ** **_ Of course _ ** **_ it was Stiles. The guy he was  _ ** **_ kinda-sorta _ ** **_ in love with. But he had a carefully crafted look to maintain.  _ **

**_ “...You don’t trust me, and I don’t trust you.” (a lie.) “But you need me to survive, which is why you’re not letting me go.” _ **

**_ Stiles was still staring at his phone. _ **

**_ Derek sighed as best he could with his mouth halfway full of water. _ **

**_ “Scott isn’t  _ ** **_ gonna _ ** **_ answer you. He’s busy. We’re  _ ** **_ gonna _ ** **_ be okay.” _ **

**_ He sputtered as a little more water got into his mouth.  _ **

**_ “Sorry, sorry. You’re right. I need something to hold on to now. I can’t stay up.” _ **

**_ As Stiles pulled them towards the diving block, the  _ ** **_ kanima _ ** **_ appeared out of nowhere. Its claws swiped at Stiles, and Derek’s panicked. He wasn’t afraid of drowning, but Stiles- _ **

_ - _

His eyes shot open as his body twitched on the cot. He instinctively raised his arms to shield his eyes from the blinding light being shone in them but he couldn’t get them high enough. His legs and head were the same, only lifting slightly before something  _ caught _ and he was yanked back down. He was panicking, he couldn’t breathe. The light was suddenly gone but he still couldn’t  _ see- _

“Yeah, he’s awake. Leave him chained, they’ll get him out later. God, why can’t this fucker ever just  _ sleep _ ?”

A voice. Slightly to his left. A door slammed shut and the echo caused him to slam his eyes shut again. He breathed deep and counted slowly to twenty to will the growing tide of panic in his chest away.

_ In one two three four... _

_ Out five six seven eight... _

With the terror  dissipating in his chest, his eyes opened and his memories came rushing back to him as he took in his surroundings. He remembered.

-

He is twenty-two years, seven months, and twelve days old. His family died in a fire he started one year, ten months, and twenty-six days ago. He was admitted to Eichen House one year, four months, and six days ago. He keeps track. 

Officially, He is a ‘homicidal arsonist’ who ‘doused the house in gasoline and struck a match with his family sleeping inside’. He never told anyone any different. In fact, he hasn’t spoken in  one year,  ten  months, and  twenty-six  days . The court couldn’t explain how he was unharmed but yet had apparently been in the house the entire time, so the judge sentenced him to getting psychological help instead of jail time. So now here Derek Hale sits, rotting away day by day in this hell hole. 

-

Breakfast is at seven every morning. That’s a constant. What isn’t a constant, however,  are  his visions-  _ dreams, his therapist Dr. Morrell, calls them. He occasionally writes things down for her to read _ _ \-  _ aren't a constant. They come to him on random nights and leave him screaming and sobbing and thrashing in his cot. The one thing constant about them is he wakes up in the morning strapped down with two orderlies sitting beside him. The restraints constantly get roughly undone and he constantly gets yanked out of bed and constantly pushed down the hall to the cafeteria. Derek sits at the same table, in the same chair, staring at the same place, constantly. His constants are the reason he gets out of bed in the mornings. His favorite constant is the man who sits at the table across the room from him, directly in Derek’s line of sight. 

Derek gets lost in the routine of watching the man’s hollow cheeks, his paper-thin wrists, and the dark blue crescents hugging up to his eyes. The way one bony hand lifts his spoonful of oatmeal to his mouth without shaking in the slightest, while the other occasionally taps a rhythm into his sweatpants-clad thigh. One finger lifting and falling, then the other, repeating the cycle until they’ve all tapped. Then he does it over again. It took Derek a long time to realize the man was counting his fingers. He liked to play a little game with himself where he would guess when the man would tap his leg.  _ (He lost more often than not) _ . Derek watches the man. The man watches him right back. 

Every single day for  one year, four months, and  two  days , Derek eats his plain bagel and Stiles eats his oatmeal.

-

On Derek’s fourth day at Eichen, his heart stopped beating for three full minutes. He didn’t have his routine yet. He didn’t have his constants yet. He refused to eat and he couldn’t sleep. So, he sat at his table in the cafeteria at seven oh six in the morning, and he stared and stared and stared at the chair lining wall on the other side of the room until he absolutely couldn’t anymore. He blinked his dry eyes and jumped slightly when he realized the seat he was staring at now had someone in it. He was beautiful. Derek takes in the man’s unruly dark hair, his pale-  _ dangerously pale _ \- skin, the moles dotting  a dark path across  his cheek and down his neck, the slight upturn to his button nose. When his whiskey colored eyes lift slightly and meet Derek’s, he’s floored. The man brings his spoonful of oatmeal to his mouth and offers him a small, tentative smile and for the first time in a lifetime, Derek smiles back.

Aching to get there as fast as he can, Derek rushes out of his group therapy session to hurry to the cafeteria for lunch. His chair is waiting for him, so he plops down and watches the other side of the room. Fifteen minutes later the chair is still empty, and Derek strangely feels like crying. He lets his mind wander  _ (do they have lunch at the same time? does he have rec right now? maybe  _ _ group _ _ therapy?) _ , resigning himself to waiting  _ (and hoping) _ for the man to show up before lunch is over. There’s five minutes left of lunch when Derek finally realizes the man’s table is no longer unoccupied. He’s back, but yet somehow is skin is paler than it was that morning, taking on a sickly appearance. His eyes are on Derek’s but they’re unfocused. His mouth has a slight tilt to it though, so Derek counts that as a win. 

Dinner goes much the same way, with him rushing out of his own rec time to make it to the cafeteria. The man isn’t there again, but Derek doesn’t let his mind get ahead of him. So, he does what he does best and waits in silence. Forty-five minutes later, a kind looking orderly in light blue scrubs pushes a cart full of medication to the doors of the cafeteria. The squeaking of the front left wheel alerts the patients that their dinner time is up and a line begins forming for prescription medicine. The man never came to dinner and Derek feels  _ wrong _ . His skin feels too tight over his bones and each shallow breath he takes feels like a knife carving into his lungs. He gasps when he stands up, the movement sending bolts of pain throughout his legs, and he almost collapses to the floor. He feels it though, a buzzing underneath his ribcage, and because of it he knows he needs to find the man  _ right the fuck now _ . Everything will feel better when he sees him. But Derek knows he has to take his medicine. They’ll make him take his medicine;  _ they always do.  _

He waits in the line, wincing with every step he takes until he finally gets his cup full of pills. The nurse thankfully doesn’t comment on how sweaty he is and how he clearly looks like he’s in pain, so he downs the cup’s contents without fanfare and limps as fast has his aching legs will carry him out of the cafeteria. Derek doesn’t even know the man’s name, but yet the rope that feels like it’s tied around his lungs gets a little looser with every step he takes so his pain-addled brain is fairly confident he’s going in the right direction. He’s halfway across the courtyard, out of building C and towards building A, when suddenly the pressure that’s been building in his chest _ snaps, _ like a rubber band that’s been stretched too far. He bowls over with the intensity of being able to breathe again, then promptly  _ drops to the fucking ground  _ when every single window in building A completely shatters and an ear-splitting, all-encompassing  _ shriek  _ fills his head. 

Some distant part of Derek’s brain that didn’t immediately shut off when the screaming started realizes that he’s convulsing on the concrete, he feels something wet beneath his hands where they’re covering his ears and-  _ oh that’s blood _ . He’s bleeding out of his ears and probably his nose too. This part of his brain also catalogues that the screaming has stopped but he’s still seizing. There’re people talking around him and over him and they’re shouting- then the rest of his body dies too. 

-

**_ “What are you doing here? This is private property.” _ **

**_ “Uh, sorry man, we didn’t know.” _ **

**_ Derek was staring at two boys. One was a floppy-haired boy with tanned skin and a crooked jaw. The other was the color of the moon, craters and all across his face, and close-cropped hair. He was absolutely enthralling, and Derek’s heart painfully thumped in his chest when their eyes met. Derek tossed an inhaler to the other boy and gave them both a pointed look before turning on his heel.  _ **

**_ “Dude, that was Derek Hale... His family, they all burned to death in a fire, like, ten years ago.” _ **

**_ “I wonder what he’s doing back.” _ **

**_ - _ **

Derek woke up in the hospital exactly sixty minutes after he died. They told him he was pronounced dead on the scene. Three minutes later, on the dot, he sat up in bed perfectly fine. One brief checkup later and he was back in his room. He didn’t see the man for nine days after that. That was the first time he had a vision.

-

The orderlies talk a lot. They don’t care who listens, because  _ who are the nutcases going to tell?  _ They talk about Stiles a lot. Derek hears them when they say he stays one ward over from him, in the dead-ends. He isn’t ever leaving it. He hears them when they say that he screams a lot. He screams so loud that the walls shake and lights flicker and sometimes,  _ sometimes,  _ people are hospitalized. They keep him sedated at night but yet the shrieks still come in his sleep occasionally. They give him a decent dose in the mornings to keep him drowsy during the day. Derek hears the whispers that in the rare moments Stiles talks, in his creepy, croaking voice... he knows things he shouldn’t,  _ couldn’t.  _ No one likes being assigned to the freak, and considering where they are, that’s saying something. 

O ne year, four months, and  fifteen  days after Derek first saw Stiles, his routine broke. He woke up in the middle of the night, but not to his own crying, not to being strapped down, not to any negative feelings. He woke up to someone holding his hand. Stiles was holding his hand. 

Derek sat up freely, he was confused but it was so  _ nice _ to have Stiles so close after all this time, after seeing him and holding him-  _ loving him _ \- in his visions. His mouth opened to speak but he floundered for a minute, his brain not quite knowing how to form words anymore. But Derek was having none of  that. After all this time, he finally had something he wanted to say.

“I know you.” Derek finally managed to rasp out. 

His throat felt like sandpaper, his voice coming out weak and distorted. His eyes met  Stiles' and saw the other man’s filling with tears. Stiles lifted a finger to his chest before pointing it at Derek while mouthing a few words.

_ I know you too. _

The two men hugged desperately, finally not alone after all this time. When Stiles kisses Derek, he isn’t surprised and he welcomes it. Something that suspiciously feels like hope blooms in his chest for the first time in a lifetime.

-

The next night, Stiles sneaks a notepad and pen into Derek’s room. Derek doesn’t ask how he got them or even  _ how he got into his room twice _ . He honestly is just happy Stiles is spending time with him. They don’t try to speak after the last night, just write down whatever they have to say. Stiles explains that he’s a banshee, the voices in his head are lost souls, and he can kill with his voice. His mother was a banshee too and it killed her. Fearing for his son’s safety,  Stiles' father sent him to Eichen House when he was twelve. He was nineteen now. Derek, in turn, tells him that he was somehow a hellhound in a family of werewolves. He had a nightmare and lost control, having only just recently discovering his powers, and ended up causing his bedroom to catch on fire. The nightmare didn’t wake him up, and since he was immune to the heat, the flames didn’t either. He slept peacefully while his family burned to death in their beds. No one knew of his families’ abilities so they called him an arsonist,  _ a murderer _ . Eichen House somehow knew, so they gave him medicines that suppressed his abilities. The drugs made him almost human. Nothing that they gave Stiles worked. 

It was Stiles who realized why they were connected. They were both harbingers of death, it made sense. (The fact that their love for each other surpassed dimensions helped a little too). They both realized they had been having the same visions on the same nights. It started the day they both died at the exact same time. Stiles wouldn’t go into detail about what happened on his side of things, so Derek didn’t press. The most recent vision involved flashes of a black mask with glowing green eyes, a bent sheriff’s badge, a bloodied katana, and a girl with dark hair bleeding to death on the concrete. It was the vaguest one they had seen yet, and it had them worried. So, Stiles came to his room at night as often as he could. They needed to stop whatever it was from happening again, so they formed a plan. They kissed and cuddled and worked on getting their voices back together. Derek was to discreetly not take his medicine anymore and they trained his powers in secret. 

One year, six months, and four days later, the plan is ready.

One year, six months, and five days later, Stiles screams and Derek burns, and they get out of Echo House.

One year, six months, and five days later, they make their way to Scott McCall. 

**Author's Note:**

> derek and stiles form a connection that lets them see into an alternate timeline. so anything in bold italics is things that happen in the teen wolf show (TWS) timeline. everything else happens in this fic timeline. the show established that lydia and parrish had a connection because they're both harbingers of death so i just turned that into sterek for this fic. when the connection forms, it kills them and brings them back to life (bc i thought that'd be cool lol). the only thing i changed in the TWS timeline is that the events are more sterek-wise. like when derek dies in the s4 finale, braeden isn't there and stiles stays be derek's side, etc. derek and stiles in my fic are able to see the events from the pilot to the 3b finale. but in this fic timeline, all of the events still occur but they are only from the pilot to right before the trio become a sacrifice to find their parents. in this fic timeline, all of the events have occurred the same as in the TWS timeline, just without stiles and derek. at the end of this fic, when derek and stiles get out, they are able to find scott and the pack and stop them from being sacrifices and they save allison from dying and they are all happy. also even though they aren't in this fic, erica and boyd are still alive in this timeline bc i say so :) if you need anything else explained pls comment!


End file.
